By the time Tony co-founded Lonely Planet Publications in 1973, he already had the travel bug. And ever since, travel and discovery have been at the heart of his life and career.
I’ve recorded several podcasts, interviews, conversations recently.
At London Business School Maureen and I recorded Journeys, a conversation with Rajesh Chandy the Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Developing World at the Wheeler Institute. People seemed to enjoy it, someone suggested that we ‘looked like two teenagers our to start an exciting adventure,’ not business like at all.
With Tyrel Cameron Eskelson I talked on his Interlocutor podcast about my travel life, starting in Pakistan when I was a small child right up to travel in recent weeks and for the rest of 2025.
If the madman in the White House – you know who I mean – does decide to take out a few Iranian cultural centres I certainly don’t want to provide him with a checklist. UNESCO already has, in that there are 24 World Heritage Sites he could be picking and choosing from....
One of the remarkable things about our world today is that so often people in the street – you and I – seem to be so much smarter than the politicians who govern us. There’s no way we can ignore the effects of climate change, but it seems to take a teenager like Greta...
Of course I posted on my travels throughout the year, including on Vanuatu, Sumba Island in Indonesia, assorted Australia trips like the Torres Strait Islands, Armenia, fjord travel in Norway and Svalbard and polar bears in Norway, the wonderful mosaics of Ravenna in ...
Want to fly down to Adelaide, spend three days on a new luxury train service to Brisbane, fly back home to Melbourne and write a story about it the man from the Daily Telegraph in London enquired? Sure, why not I agreed, although I was somewhat puzzled that they knew ...
For some inexplicable reason I’ve visited most island nations in the Pacific – and the assorted French colonies – but never Vanuatu despite its proximity to Australia. I fixed that omission last month with a week on two of the islands – Espiritu Santo and Tanna. ▲ ...
Why have I never been to the Indonesian island of Sumba? The islands of Nusa Tenggara run in a chain to the east of Bali – Lombok, then Sumbawa, the Komodo Islands, Flores and finally Timor. In the middle Sumba is centred just to the south of Sumbawa-Komodo-Flores. Ov...
My new book from the National Library of Australia – Tony Wheeler’s Islands of Australia – features a section on the islands of Torres Strait, the 274 islands that dot the shallow strait which separates Cape York (the northern tip of the state of Queensland) from Papu...
Our Norway fjord trip – Part 1 and Part 2 – was preceded by a train ride from Oslo to Bergen and a short stay in Bergen and concluded with a visit to Stavanger, the oil capital of oil-wealthy Norway. ▲ The Bergensbanen is regularly cited as one of the world’s great...
With a group of friends we travelled Norwegian fjords around Bergen and Stavenger – I posted Part 1 a couple of days ago. ▲ Now I’m on to Part 2 including the old hydro power station at Flørli on Lysefjord. The building houses one remaining power turbine and statio...
It was my second trip to Norway this year. Visit 1 took me up to Svalbard, way north of the Arctic Circle, and to Svalbard’s intriguingly named capital city Longyearbyen. It also led to a cover story on the Australian Financial Review’s quarterly Sophisticated Travell...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013